In an industrial printer system, an industrial printer is typically configured to mark various types of substrates with different types of patterns. One example of an operation of such an industrial printer is the marking of patterns on various types of packages or consumer goods e.g. on a packaging line or a manufacturing assembly line. The industrial printer system may also be referred to as an industrial marking system which is configured to mark a pattern on the substrate.
The pattern marked on the substrate may be for example text, graphics, codes, images etc.
The term industrial in industrial printer, industrial printer system and industrial printing may refer to that it is related to or characterized by industry, that it is designed or suitable for use in industry. Industry may be described as the process of making products by using machinery and factories. In industry, the environmental conditions may be variable in time, the ambient temperatures may vary etc.
When marking a pattern such as e.g. a text on a substrate using an industrial printer, the font which describes the way to mark the characters or glyphs in the text is designed by hand. This is a time consuming and inefficient way of designing the font.
When marking the pattern with e.g. a laser printer, the printer may pass the same point on the object several times. When the same point is passed numerous times, there is a large risk for that the laser beam burns through the substrate e.g. in case the substrate is a plastic sheet.
In order for an ink jet printer to determine the order and angle it will fire the ink drops, it considers several inputs such as e.g. the font, the content structure, the speed of the substrate being marked on. In addition, the ink jet printer uses a hand-optimized look-up table containing the patterns of pixels that should be marked and the best way to mark those patterns. Creating and using a hand-optimized look-up table is inefficient and time consuming.
When marking a substrate with a pattern, it is desirable and advantageous for the industrial printer to perform the marking in an optimal or near optimal path. For finding an optimal or a near optimal path for a laser type of industrial printer to mark a substrate with a pattern, the brute force method may be used, i.e. by checking all possible marking paths. Such method for finding the optimal or near optimal marking path takes a very long time to execute since there are a large number of possible marking paths.
In an ink jet printer, there may be a problem that ink droplets influence each other. The firing of the ink droplets is optimized in order to avoid this, but this optimization is today performed manually by a human operator which takes a lot of time.
An unoptimized or poorly optimized font will cause an increase in mirror movement of an laser type of industrial printer, difficult speed or direction changes, all of which increase the print time and decrease the throughput, or retrace areas already marked, which could result in poor print quality such as e.g. burns on the substrate in the case of a laser industrial printer.
Therefore, there is a need to at least mitigate or solve these issues.